The curly birch is a variant of the plant species silver birch. The wood of this species has a beautiful pattern — there are dark brown patterns on a light yellow background. Scientists have not yet been able to determine why this pattern appears. Some claim that this is due to problems with mineral nutrition; others consider it a genetic disorder. A tree that is grown from a seed inherits its patterned texture from the parent tree, but scientists are still unsure how exactly this happens. It takes at least 5–10 years to determine whether the bark will be patterned or not.
This type of wood is famous not only for its aesthetic appearance, but also for the durability of its texture. Due to the tangled fibers and wavy structure, the bark almost does not prick, so it is often used to make percussion parts of instruments. Since the 13th century, сurly birch wood has been used to create art and everyday itenms. Local tribes even paid taxes by providing wood.
In Russian literature, the first information about the сurly birch appeared in 1766, when a German forester Ferdinand Gabriel Fokel described Russian forests in Karelia and the adjacent areas. A Russian architect Vasily Stasov was one of the first to use сurly birch furniture for the interiors of his customers.
At the Forest Institute of the Karelian Scientific Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the scientists Vladimir Ermakov and Lidia Vetchinnikova developed an accelerated method of birch cultivation in the late 1980s. This is done by grafting branches to young trunks. As a result, several clones of a precious species are obtained. In the case with the tree grown from a seed, only 30–40% of plants inherit the features of the сurly birch. When the method of Ermakov and Vetchinnikova is used, all grafted birches become curly birches. This tree is from 5 to 7 meters high maximum; it lives no more than 40 years.
Due to its unique wood and limited resources, the сurly birch is highly valued on the world market. It is not sold in cubic meters, like ordinary wood, but by weight in kilograms, as an ornamental material.
Even Carl Faberge used this precious wood. In 1917, his company was commissioned by Emperor Nicholas II and produced the “Birch tree” Easter Egg.
